Peter Thiel's creative machine is down.

"Our creative machine has been down," said Peter Thiel, a former son of a slot:

"Between the dilemma and the death ... The car we wanted to fly in the sky turned out to be 140 words (Twitter). ”

Then I would like to say that he is not really saying that there is no reason. We are still relying on outdated intellectual property systems to drive and motivate innovative ideas and start-ups. But the problem is, many intelligent and gifted entrepreneurs tend not to resist the temptation to "buy" and invest their time and energy in solving "low impact" problems, while traditional venture capitalists evade the idea that at first glance is unusual, but often revolutionary, Paul The idea of a black swan effect in Graham's eyes.

In this case, we really appreciate the foundation (note 1) of Peter Diamandis's X-prize, which has spawned a variety of novel and radical ideas by introducing a new "competition model". The X-prize Foundation itself has been successful in a number of areas and will achieve similar success in more areas. But this is just the beginning, and Steven Johnson, in his latest book, ' Future Perfect ', mentions that we need to introduce a similar x-prize mechanism to everything in the world:

"Although the various creative prizes have existed for centuries, we have never developed their full potential." ”

What does that mean? When an innovation can be clearly delineated, the reward mechanism is more conducive to the stimulation, diffusion and promotion of new ideas than the chaotic knowledge product system. To put it simply, patenting an idea limits the spread of the idea and limits the freedom of others to innovate more based on the idea, whereas the reward mechanism allows innovators to keep their hands off them and reap lucrative profits.

Next let's count the accounts. If you add up all the charity bonuses in the world, the total amount will not exceed 375 million dollars. You might think this is a big amount, but in a trillion-dollar scale of global action, that number is nothing. Now let's use Larry Page's moonshoot Thinking (note 2) to make bold guesses: if we can get the total amount of the bonus over the current 1000 times times, what will happen ...

You ask, how do you do that, here's a series of crazy ideas based on the above goals:

First, we need to introduce the world's first public-funded innovation awards. Is this going to work? The answer is that Kickstarter has proved the potential of the public. You might think this is not convincing, for example, Yvon Chouinard revolutionized the ' Butenafine for the planet ' campaign and successfully raised more than 50 million dollars to protect Patagonia land. He also raised the money through public fund-raising: tens of thousands of companies took out 1% of their wages and 50 million of them. The method is simple but powerful.

Now, let's assume that these companies are not donating money to charity, instead, they contribute to our creative fund, and the use of the Fund also follows the Kickstarter model, that is, if the total amount of funding is not up to expectations, or if there is no corresponding innovation within a certain period of time, the money will be available to all of you, Flow back to the company. Is this not an effective and win-win mechanism for these companies?

And then we thought, what would happen if a charity idol like Branson could launch his Virgin empire to support such a concept? What if he could appeal to the media and even the world's top 500 CEOs to support such a concept? How much money do you think everyone can raise together? 1 billion, 10 billion, or 100 billion dollars?

Assuming that we have reached the funding target, we can then assign all the money to 50 different areas, for example, for drug research, global warming, respectively, to a x-prize innovation reward, you pick. Specific award settings can also refer to global opinion leaders, as well as to academics who work at the University of Singularities.

More than that, these awards focus on products and process innovation that can be scaled up, not expensive and eye-catching prototypes. These groundbreaking innovations can allow anyone to adopt, reproduce, innovate, and disseminate, rather than be patented and shelved.

In this case, let's think about what kind of creative explosion this new reward mechanism will bring. Past creative prizes have shown that participants spend far more on creative research than the total amount of creative prizes--for example, in the Ansari Grand Prix, teams spent more than 100 million dollars, only to pursue a $10 million bonus. So if we can get creative to share, what's the bonus?

Finally quote Archimedes once said a word: "Give me a lever, I can tilt the earth." ”

The innovation bonus is the lever. Who knows, if the smartest people in the world could rely on a rich economic drive to delve into projects that are bold enough to leave traces in the universe, Peter Thiel might get the flying cars he wants.

PostScript: Google recently created a new forum called Solve for x, which is dedicated to sharing the bold ideas mentioned above, many of which can be obtained from the above mentioned public-chip awards. Branson has not yet replied to this post.

1.x-prize: An educational non-profit organization designed to drive major changes that are beneficial to all mankind through competition.
2.Moonshot thinking: The concept of the Black Swan effect mentioned by Paul Graham is similar to breaking old notions and embracing bold and innovative ideas.